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Killingly - Softcover

Beutner, Katharine

 
9781641295710: Killingly
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1641295716 ISBN 13: 9781641295710
Verlag: Soho Crime, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Based on the unsolved real-life disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in 1897—a haunting novel of intrigue, longing, and terror, perfect for fans of Donna Tartt and Sarah Waters

Massachusetts, 1897: Bertha Mellish, “the most peculiar, quiet, reserved girl” at Mount Holyoke College, is missing.

As a search team dredges the pond where Bertha might have drowned, her panicked father and sister arrive desperate to find some clue to her fate or state of mind. Bertha’s best friend, Agnes, a scholarly loner studying medicine, might know the truth, but she is being unhelpfully tightlipped, inciting the suspicions of Bertha’s family, her classmates, and the private investigator hired by the Mellish family doctor. As secrets from Agnes’s and Bertha’s lives come to light, so do the competing agendas driving each person who is searching for Bertha.

Where did Bertha go? Who would want to hurt her? And could she still be alive?

Edmund White Award–winning author Katharine Beutner takes a real-life unsolved mystery and crafts it into an unforgettable historical portrait of academia, family trauma, and the risks faced by women who dared to pursue unconventional paths at the end of the 19th century.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katharine Beutner is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; previously, she taught in Ohio and Hawai`i. She earned a BA in Classical Studies at Smith College and an MA in English (creative writing) and a PhD in English literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first novel, Alcestis, won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and was a finalist for other awards, including the Lambda Literary Association’s Lesbian Debut Fiction Award. Her writing has appeared in Tinfish, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Toast, TriQuarterly, Humanities, and other publications. Recently, she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is the editor in chief of The Dodge, a magazine of eco-writing and translation.

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1


That morning Agnes was drawing the cracked pelvis of a beaver. She had found it in the woods near Upper Lake, where the men had been searching for Bertha. Usually she could collect only chipmunk bones or rabbit or squirrel. She’d never drawn a beaver before.
     The men were still searching for Bertha. Agnes had wondered, briefly, what else they might find in the ponds. Perhaps there were other girls who had vanished in the College woods, other bones tangled in the roots of the pines along the grassy edges of the water. The bow of the clavicle, the bowl of the pelvis. She had wanted to see. But it was habit now to keep to herself, to appear as unobjectionable as possible. Mute as the white cross hung upon her wall and banal as the cross-stitched hymns beside it. She’d been spared freckles and red or black hair; hers was dark brown like soaked wood and lay flatter against her head than was fashionable. She and Bertha simply scraped their damp hair back after a washing—because dowdiness was permissible, even godly. Dowdiness had been a shield for them both.
     Agnes had a narrow room on the third floor of Porter Hall, a slim little desk and chair designed for the ministers’ daughters who thronged the College. Bertha had fit these chairs well. Agnes herself was not narrow. She was a broad spare girl of twenty, trim but tall and square-shouldered and square-hipped. She never drew self-portraits, though she was a fine draughtswoman in the anatomical mode. She did not wish to look at herself long enough to see the truth of her body, how its overlapping rectangles would sit like bare fenced pastures on the page: Agnes Sullivan, all enclosure.
     The girls on her hall usually left her alone, as they had left Bertha alone, because they disliked her almost as much as they had disliked Bertha. They still disliked Bertha, in the midst of their fluttering about her mysterious fate. Their dull antipathy did not bother Agnes. Being alone meant that she could concentrate on her work. But Agnes could not trust, any longer, that she would be left alone. Not after what she had done.
     There were certain things Bertha had told Agnes that she might still need to do.
     Bertha had said: You must lie. No one knows anything, no one can prove anything. Just us. So you can’t—you can’t give in. You must go on. Be strong.
     Bertha said, as she kissed Agnes’s hand: I don’t want you to leave college. But you might have to.
     And Agnes said: No. I won’t.
     Bertha had been missing for one full day. Agnes bent closer to her sketch. Her pencil feathered in a shadow on the page: the fissure in the beaver’s bone, where its strength had failed.
 
While Agnes drew, the Reverend John Hyrcanus Mellish and his older daughter, Florence, stood outside the president’s office in a dark anteroom with thick red carpets that made the place feel muffled, like a silent cavern of some massive body. The building, Mary Lyon Hall, was massive, too—another collegiate Gothic cathedral of rough red stone with a grand clock tower that pierced the gray sky. Florence found herself struggling to breathe inside its bulk. She had been struggling to breathe since the telegram arrived.
     Florence and her father had taken the train up from Killingly through Worcester shortly after dawn. The Reverend had dozed against the window while Florence sat straight beside him in miserable anticipation, her stockinged knees thick lumps under her skirt, and drummed her heels against one another to keep blood moving in her feet. They’d changed trains again in Springfield, in a station astringent with the smell of urine even in the chilly weather. A filthy boy had tried to lift Florence’s purse and cried when she shoved him back, and Florence had thought, Nobody is getting what he wants today.
     Despite the cold she had taken off her gloves and spent the last hour of the journey picking at the base of her left thumbnail until it bled—an old, bad habit to keep panic at bay. Even in the dim light of the anteroom, now, she could see a brown dapple on the green fabric of her glove.
     Mrs. Mead opened the office door herself: a sturdy older woman in a black gabardine dress and a starched blouse with a fringed lace collar that nearly touched her prominent ears. Her gaze was clear and cold. She couldn’t have been more different from delicate Mrs. Ward, who had been the College’s president in Florence’s time. Florence remembered waiting outside Mrs. Ward’s office on a sunny May morning, preparing to make her apologies for her departure from Mount Holyoke after only one year. She had blamed her mother’s poor health, and Mrs. Ward, a trusting soul, had been most understanding.
     “Miss Mellish, Reverend Mellish, come in,” Mrs. Mead said, shortly, and waited for Florence to settle her father in a chair. “I am very sorry for your distress. I will tell you all I know.”
     There wasn’t much to tell and Mrs. Mead made short work of it. She described the dragging of the lakes and the teams of searchers in the woods: men were walking the banks of the Connecticut River in case Bertha had gone out on one of her long hikes alone and tumbled in; the police were finding a Parrott gun to fire over the water, to raise the corpse with the force of its concussion. Mrs. Mead said “the corpse” quite calmly, with no gulping or quavering. “Of course,” she added, and here she seemed to warm, the way an iron warms in fire, “there is still reason to hope that she has not drowned—that we will find her alive, soon.”
     As they exited the building, the crisp air forced a gasp from Florence’s lungs. It was not a sob. She would not allow that.
     Her father tugged at her elbow.
     “I want to look over the campus,” the Reverend said, his gaze tracking up Prospect Hill, the promontory that stretched along the College’s eastern border. From there, you could command a view toward both Upper and Lower Lake, surveying the manicured trees and impressive structures of the freshly expanded campus. She knew what he wanted. He was hungry to discern Bertha camouflaged like a dryad among those trees and buildings. Desperate to search her out, drag her away from the College, just as Florence had once been dragged away.
     “She’s not here,” she whispered, knowing he wouldn’t hear.
     But it was easier to obey than to argue, most of the time. They made their slow way to the bridge across the brook at Lower Lake, and with each step Florence heard Mrs. Mead’s voice. The corpse, she thought, the corpse.
     Even in her time at the school they’d told the story of the Lady of Lower Lake, a senior so distraught over her failing grades that she’d flung herself to a hanging death from this bridge while stabbing a dagger into her own heart. As a young woman Florence had thought this tale comically baroque, especially its coda—the voice of the dead girl echoing from beneath the bridge when a classmate crossed it. Help me, the girl had cried, I’m down here, while her body cooled in the pond water.
     As they crossed the bridge now Florence felt as if her whole body had opened wide like the...

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Verlag
Soho Crime
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1641295716
ISBN 13 
9781641295710
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
347
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
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